Daniel Dennett, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Consciousness is not a unified inner stage on which experience is displayed to an inner observer — there is no Cartesian Theater. The brain is a massively parallel processor that produces multiple competing narrative drafts; what we call the stream of consciousness is the virtual serial machine running on that parallel hardware.1 There is no fact of the matter about which of the drafts is "the conscious one" at any pre-report moment.
Heterophenomenology is the corresponding third-person method: take subjects' verbal reports of conscious experience as data for naturalistic science, neither privileged as direct access nor dismissed as mere noise.2345
This stream of contents is only rather like a narrative because of its multiplicity; at any point in time there are multiple "drafts" of narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain. Probing this stream at different places and times produces different effects, precipitates different narratives from the subject.Consciousness Explained, pp. 138–139
The one essay that makes such a claim specifically, Thompson, Noë, and Pessoa's essay on perceptual completion or "filling in" (see also Pessoa, Thompson, and Noë 1998), corrects some errors in my heterophenomenological treatment of the same phenomena, but it is itself a worthy piece of heterophenomenology, in spite of the authors declarations to the contrary (see Dennett 1998b, and their reply, Chapter 6 same…Sweet Dreams - Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, pp. 149–150
Heterophenomenology is the beginning of a science of consciousness, not the end. It is the organization of the data, a catalog of what must be explained, not itself an explanation. And in maintaining this neutrality, it is actually doing justice to the first-person perspective, because you yourself, as a subject in a masked priming experiment, cannot discover anything in your experience that favors A or B.Sweet Dreams - Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, pp. 40–42
There Something Out? Consciousness Explained, (Dennett 1991) described method, heterophe- nomenology, which explicitly designed neutral leading objective physical science insistence third-person point view, method phenomenological description (in principle) justice private ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning methodological principles science. (, p72.) How does it work?The Fantasy of First-Person Science, p. 2
Would it be more apt to say the higher tone sounded louder, or is it really just that it seems clearer or better focused? I attend to my particular conscious experience and arrive at a judgment about which words would do the most justice to its character. When I am satisfied that I have framed an accurate report, I express it.Consciousness Explained, pp. 269–270
The position is fully developed in Consciousness Explained (1991) and defended against critics across Brainchildren (1998), Sweet Dreams (2005), and the 2001 Chalmers debate. I have not retreated from the no-seemings thesis under pressure from Brook or Thompson; their domestication move — that the Multiple Drafts Model is compatible with but does not imply the elimination of phenomenal seemings — saves a Husserlian phenomenology I do not want to save.